


Apostrophe to the Rain

by losselen (zambla)



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: M/M, Rainy day sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-06
Updated: 2014-04-06
Packaged: 2018-01-18 10:15:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1424761
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zambla/pseuds/losselen
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is something about the moment that makes Remus tremble with love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Apostrophe to the Rain

**Author's Note:**

> Written in 2004. Minimal edits.

 

 

  
It’s brilliant day and it’s rain and it’s fucked up things exposed to the elements, wrapped in the nonsense language.

  
*

Sirius’s arm trembles as he holds the smoke, shielding the small, fragile spark with the sweep of his hand. It flickers in the wind and rain and the fierceness; it tints his face with a ghost light, makes him look more alive. Remus sees him, all the way from a distance, a dark and timid figure leaning against the greenhouse, face lifted and hissing and pained and elegant. The sky weighs over him and all around him and everything bows and it looks like Sirius is the only one with his back upright, knees unbent.

He stretches his hand out, once and twice. He _shivers_.

There is something about the moment that makes Remus tremble with love. He feels like he won’t breathe, because of all this spring in the air, all this life, all this space swelling around him. There are drops clinging to the nylon of his umbrella—like gems, or stars.

 _Lend a smoke will you?_ Remus reaches, gingerly into the warmth of Sirius’s sphere, and Sirius says _Here_. There’s a faint hiss of paper burning. There’s a faint color to the wet rhythm, setting them off-balance.

Suddenly the rain starts to pour, with clang clang clang against the loose bolts of the glass pane. The promise in it mixed with peculiar catharsis.

“So. What’re you doing here?”

“Listening.”

“Yeah? Going to give me that rubbish?”

“I guess so.”

And it’s beautiful for a second when Sirius looks up, looks at him the way he has never done before; Remus’s eyes only meet him halfway. There is a faint beat of the oncoming deluge cornering them; a howl is heard from the forest. Remus is the one to look down, but it’s not about that.

It’s not about anything. The rain makes a symphony around the silence around both of them around the spaces in the mist. It sounds like little spiders on thin, thin wires.

Suddenly, Remus reaches into his pocket.

“Sirius.”

“Hmm?”

“Look here.”

The polaroid between Remus’s hands flashes—darkly, brilliantly, perfectly, faithfully—and catches Sirius in a picture.

*

Across the window the glass is reaping sunlight. Dusk carves shadows from the templates of their silhouettes, two doubles. Alive enough.

They sit there, beer bottles dangling gently from their fingers, two distinct figures that do not touch.

Remus whispers, _Everything is alive._

*

When they are together they are _together_.

Remus likes to strain back Sirius's neck when he has him pinned down flat on his stomach on the floor. Remus licks along the neck, the skin of the shoulder, the place behind his ear, the projections of the vertebratee. He traces everything because this is how he remembers things. He smiles when muscles tense and loosen, entering slowly with Sirius moaning—softly, breathlessly—beneath him.

Sirius likes it when he's on his knees and he has Remus wrapped in his mouth. When it's like that he uses his hands to prop himself and hold Remus' hip in place. His tongue flickers there, over the head of Remus's cock and Sirius can taste the deep sigh dissolving from Remus's mouth. Uh. When he looks up, he can see Remus's neck strained, upward-turned, mouth open like a drowning fish.

It gives him the feeling like he's just finished _A Portrait_ and he's stopped speaking for a long while and he's out there, the season clinging onto his legs and the city's smoke and his cigarette's smoke all muddling together in the spaces around his head.

Sirius, sometimes, wraps himself in his robe and stands by the window sill. The deep belly of London's first summer clings onto the smell of rain and fog of mornings. When asked, he always lies, says that he had a taste for it, the rain of the rainy days.

*

There's an alley in the back of their building that slopes down into the night, glazing like glass when it rains over.

When it's like that they stay inside, under the protection of haze. Remus kisses Sirius reverently: a reverence for these small, brilliant things: it's slow and drawn and Remus closes his eyes.

Sirius smiles and looks down, in away he had always done and Remus remembers how the room looked like, during the almost-days.

Sirius says something but the midnight nets the words away—slowly, surreptitiously, thinly;—Remus can only hear the curl in his voice.

"What? I didn't hear you."

When he Apparates, Sirius says, he dissociates.

Remus frowns, voice strained and there, desire sieving through what he says. Their mouths cover over each other's mouths. The rain chants.

Sirius grins full-teeth and flashes him the V. "Fuck you, Remus."

Remus's laughter reaches the deepest of places and it makes Sirius shiver the way rain does, falling on his hand.

*

Sirius finds him that day, curled on the bed over _We_. He lies down beside him, wrapping his arm over the scars on his bared back. They breathe and the pages in the book turn in the wind, a bit like rainsounds.

And they are still.

*

Sirius finds the picture in the bottom of Remus' desk. He sees himself. Eyes open and round. The air around him, wet and electric, framed with glow, effort, smell of life, and his face quietly surprised. He is standing there, boy in a pressed shirt and stained jeans and smoke rising from the spaces between his lips, like the mist around him, from the rain, from the warmth in the ground. His mouth is opened and the skin of his nape relieves in pale antithesis against the rain.

And he is perfectly still, too.

 

 

 

 


End file.
